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Thursday, February 18, 2010

The Founders: How Christian Were They?

By Dr. Gary Scott Smith | February 18, 2010

One
of today’s most contentious culture wars is over the religious
commitments of our nation’s founders. Were most of them orthodox
Christians, deists, or agnostics? Scholarly books, college classes,
radio talk shows, and blogs all debate this issue, and the Texas Board
of Education recently joined the fray. Because of Texas’ large number
of students, its huge educational fund, and its statewide curriculum
guidelines, this board strongly influences what textbooks are published
in the United States. Last month the board reviewed the state’s social
studies curriculum, and its conservative Christian members injected
more analysis of religion into the guidelines, including assessment of
whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation and how
Christian were the founders.

This issue is so heated that it was the subject of an extensive article in the most recentNew York Times Magazine, “How Christian Were the Founders?”

Conservative Christian authors such as David
Barton, Peter Marshall Jr., and Tim LaHaye contend that most of the
founders were devout Christians who sought to establish a Christian
nation. Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore in “The Godless
Constitution” and Brooke Allen in “Moral Minority: Our Skeptical
Founding Fathers” counter that very few founders were orthodox
Christians. They and others often generalize from famous founders, such
as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson,
James Madison, and Thomas Paine, to argue that most founders were
deists who wanted strict separation of church and state.

The truth lies between these two positions.
Almost every major founder belonged to a Christian congregation,
although a sizable number of them were not committed Christians whose
faith strongly influenced their political philosophy and actions. Two
recent books edited by Daniel Dreisbach, Jeffry Morrison, and Mark
David Hall—“The Founders on God and Government”
and “The Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life”—carefully
explained the religious backgrounds, convictions, and contributions of
numerous founders. They show that many who played leading roles in the
nation’s Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress, and the
devising and ratification of the Constitution were devout Christians,
as evident in their church attendance, commitment to prayer and Bible
reading, belief in God’s direction of earthly affairs, and conduct.
Among others, these books discuss John Witherspoon, James Wilson,
Samuel Adams, George Mason, Oliver Ellsworth, Patrick Henry, John Jay,
Benjamin Rush, and Roger Sherman.

A third book, which is currently
being written, will explain how the faith of Congregationalist John
Hancock, Quaker John Dickinson, Presbyterian Elias Boudinot, and
Episcopalian Charles Pinckney, and others helped shape their political
views, policies, and practice. Abigail Adams and Catholics Charles
Carroll, Daniel Carroll, and John Carroll also were dedicated
Christians. Moreover, Jay, Boudinot, Pinckney, and numerous other
founders served as officers of the American Bible Society.

Even many of those often labeled as
deists—Washington, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Alexander
Hamilton—do not fit the standard definition of deism, which asserts
that after creating the world, God has had no more involvement with it.
Deism views God as a transcendent first cause who is not immanent,
triune, fully personal, or sovereign over human affairs. All of these
founders, however, repeatedly discussed God’s providence and frequently
affirmed the value of prayer. Their conviction that God intervened in
human affairs and directed history has led some scholars to call these
founders “warm” or “enlightened” deists, but these terms seem like
oxymorons. A better label for their position is theistic rationalism.
As Professor Gregg Frazer explains, this hybrid belief system combines
elements of “natural religion, Protestant Christianity, and
rationalism—with rationalism as the controlling element.” Those
espousing this perspective believed in a powerful, benevolent Creator
who established the laws by which the universe operates. They also
believed that God answered prayer, that people best served Him by
living a moral life, and that individuals would be rewarded or punished
in the afterlife based on their earthly deeds. Only a few founders,
most notably Thomas Paine and Ethan Allan, can properly be called
deists.

Despite their theological differences,
virtually all the founders maintained that morality depended on
religion (which for them meant Christianity). They were convinced that
their new republic could succeed only if its citizens were virtuous.
For both ideological and pragmatic reasons, the founders opposed
establishing one denomination as a national church. However, they
provided public support of Christianity through various means,
including establishing Christian denominations at the state level,
passing state laws restricting public office holding to Christians and
punishing blasphemy, issuing proclamations of thanksgiving to God and
calls for fasting, using federal money to finance missions to Indians,
and permitting Christian congregations to use governmental facilities,
both at the state and federal level, for their worship services.

While we must be careful not to overstate
the role of religion in the founding of our nation and the Christian
convictions of the founders in textbooks or public discourse, the
tendency in many scholarly circles has been to ignore or discount these
matters. The battle over how Christian the founders were is likely to
continue in Texas and across the country. Fortunately, meticulous
scholarship is providing a much more accurate picture of the founders’
religious commitments.

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"The truth lies between these two positions." Indeed it does. It's about time that I give you credit--you're showing a bit of the truth between those positions.

One time in college, I did research for a paper on African-American jeremiads. I found that even many white people shared the convictions of the black authors of jeremiads to some degree. Even the most famously deistic founding father, Thomas Jefferson, has this quote attributed to him on the issue of slavery: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

As a high school history teacher, it's good to know (but unpopular to state) that our Founders had clearly revealed their various shades of theism, but such theological shades of meaning between a "warm" deism and outright theism is lost on most school boards, let alone other teachers or parents. In their rush to divide church and state (only a single reference in the Federalist Papers!), secular believers often overlook the appeal to (usually) Divine authority that most patriots considered essential not only to revolutionary success, but long term survival of a democratic nation. (They should instead recall the intro to the Declaration, supposedly penned by Jefferson, long honored as a zealot Deist.) This truly is an important difference as it informs the later 1st and 2nd Great Awakenings, as well as issues coming out of these movements, such as temperance, the women's movement, the general evolution of American religious thought, and of course, slavery. Keep up the good work, Dr. Scott.